7 surprising questions about skills to unlock an essential starting point for (digital) upskilling

At PwC, we believe upskilling is crucial for society as it’s urgent for everyone to live, learn, work, and participate in the digital world. Bridging the global skills gap requires collaboration among all stakeholders to create a more resilient, capable, and inclusive world. But there is a mismatch between current skills and those needed for the digital age. And at PwC we’ve been upskilling our people and helping others accelerate their upskilling journey.

Do we need to start with skills literacy?

Upskilling is complex, especially with multiple stakeholders. We might need to start with the basics: skills literacy.  The term itself doesn’t exist and might get confused with literacy skills which is the ability to read and write. Skills literacy is an ability to describe skills and clarify which skills are applied to certain tasks.  While people generally know skills exist and can name them, we need to ensure everyone is at the same skills literacy level as this will be essential for solving the upskilling problem.

How many skills do you have?

Asking someone how many skills they have often leads to confusion. In a survey I recently ran, most people thought they had between 20 and 40 skills. This raises questions about what counts as a skill. Communication, for example, is a skill that includes listening, speaking, writing, and storytelling, just to name a few. Leadership, project management, and problem-solving also require multiple skills. So instead of calling these ‘skills’, we might consider these as ‘skillsets’ or ‘skill sets’.

Why can’t we agree on categories and names of skills?

There are different names for skills. According to Thesaaurus.com, there are 61 synonyms and antonyms for ‘skill’ (ability, talent, expertise, competence, proficiency, aptitude). So, agreeing on the names of categories and skills already feels like a long shot. One category of skills you no doubt heard about is soft skills. There are ‘hard’ skills, which might be called ‘technical’ or job-specific skills. There is no agreement on how many categories of skills there are, as you can have other categories such as life skills, people skills, social skills, cognitive skills and, of course, digital skills.

We probably agree on the names of skills, right?

You would think. And for many skill(set)s like Communication, Problem Solving, Leadership, these names feel universal. Yet, when we go a level below, to the skills making up those skill sets, there appears to be little agreement. If you try searching “communication skills”, you’ll discover different views on the top 5, top 7, top 10. Although some elements are common, none of these lists are the same.  There are also variations of skills. When adding skills to your LinkedIn profile, you can enter what you believe the skill is and a list of existing skills appear.  When I entered storytelling, a list of 11 variations appeared, from visual storytelling, digital storytelling, interactive storytelling, corporate storytelling, brand storytelling, data storytelling and even ‘storytelling’ appeared twice.  If we want to work with stakeholders on upskilling, it will help if we can agree on what we are (up)skilling.

We can talk about skills if we want to

Organizations can define their own categories and names for skills. However, if they do not align with those of other organizations, this can lead to misunderstandings and feel like business jargon. Organizations often try to talk about skills. For example, I’ve had various teams tell me they want or need their people to develop their soft skills.  My first question is always: What skills do you specifically mean? And while people generally understand the need for skills, proficiency levels and definitions vary widely. I believe we become lazy when talking about skills at work. Our annual appraisal focuses on behaviors around our goals rather than specific skills.

Skills are normally associated with a ‘task’ or ‘activity.’

Going back to the communication skills, those skills depend on how we are applying them:

·         I need to write a report, so I need (report) writing skills.

·         I need to present the findings of the report, so I need presentation skills.

·         I need to manage the project, so I need project management skills.

In each of those examples, the task itself sounds like the (singular) skill(set).  But how many skills are required for one task?  Likely more than one. The reality is that most tasks require multiple skills. If I am going to write that report, if I don’t understand the needs of my audience, I can have the best ‘writing’ skills, but the quality of my report will be poor, and my report writing skill(s) will be deemed to be poor.  So, if we try to define our skills based on ‘what we do’ (at work, away from work), the list also becomes quite long, AND when we consider each of those requires multiple skills, it’s no wonder we struggle to list the skills we have.

There is another important element of skills – methods of ‘tools’

These can be a physical tool, frameworks, steps to an approach or acronyms (mnemonics) to remember or trigger behaviors e.g. GROW for coaching conversations and AID for providing feedback.  If every skill had one method, the number of tools would be equally large AND the names of these are also not universal.

Three examples, one from everyday life, one technical (work) and another from sports

Skill set                      Skills                                                  Tools              For Tasks

Assembling                Quality, dexterity, coordination    Allen wrench   Assembling a shelf

Financial modelling    Accounting, modelling, Excel             Excel               Building a model

Offence (scoring)        Dribbling, passing, shooting              A.W.E.             Playing basketball

Are we talking about 3 skills or (at a minimum) 9 skills?  Interestingly, you could also make a case for referring to the tools as skills.  Someone could have ‘hammering’ skills or is skilled with operating hand tools. You have probably heard someone refer to Excel skills. Never heard of the A.W.E. tool? I made it up: it’s an acronym I could use when coaching a player to remind them of three important elements when shooting: 1. Angle, as in having the necessary shot trajectory 2. Wrist, as in snapping your wrist when releasing 3. Elbow, as in making sure your elbow is properly aligned to the basket.

There is yet another important element of skills – a mindset

A mindset can be simply described as a belief which determines behavior and attitudes. Every time we perform a task, we are behaving in a certain way and doing it with some sort of attitude. So, your mindset when applying skills is not only important, but it can also fundamentally change the outcome of the task. Back to our list, playing basketball, if my mindset is about ‘team’, I will most likely be passing the ball more often than shooting, unless my mindset is ‘scoring’.  When assembling, a mindset around quality will lead to a different outcome compared to speed.

Is GenAI a skill?

First, just to be clear, I haven’t heard anyone calling GenAI a skill (yet).  If we were to consider it as a skill set, let’s go back to our table and see how this might appear

Skill set                      Skills                                                  Tools              For Tasks

Assembling                Quality, dexterity, coordination    Allen wrench   Assembling a shelf

Financial modelling    Accounting, modelling, Excel             Excel               Building a model

Offence (scoring)        Dribbling, passing, shooting              A.W.E.             Playing basketball

GenAI                          Selecting tool, prompting, reviewing ChatGPT         Numerous…

So, an argument could be made that GenAI is a skill set. Is Excel a skill (set)? Some will immediately say yes, and feel there are basic, intermediate, and advanced Excel skills. Yet, like ChatGPT, it is a tool (or application) that can be used for numerous tasks, and there are numerous skills, or tasks for that tool such as cleaning data, wrangling data, analyzing data, or visualizing data, to name a few.

Skill set                      Skills                                                  Tools              For Tasks

Assembling                Quality , dexterity, coordination    Allen wrench     Assembling a shelf

Financial modelling    Accounting, modelling, Excel            Excel               Building a model

Offence (scoring)        Dribbling, passing, shooting         A.W.E.             Playing basketball

GenAI                          Selecting tool, prompting, reviewing ChatGPT          Numerous…

Excel                           Cleaning, analyzing, visualizing           Excel               Numerous…

If everyone would have the same view or understanding, we would be in a better place to talk about skills to solve the upskilling problem.

What are digital skills?

The question feels like the need I am hearing around soft skills: What exactly do you want to develop? Just like any category (or skill sets), once we go a layer down, there does not appear to be a universal definition of the skills making up digital skills.

Is the foundation for digital skills digital literacy?

In the video “Bridging the Digital Divide”, the importance of upskilling is highlighted as well as the role of governments and organizations, and the social and economic risks of ignoring automation. In that context digital literacy comes up and when I asked Microsoft Copilot for a definition of digital literacy, this is what it gave me: 

The ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies.  It encompasses a variety of skills and competencies, including

Technical Skills: The ability to use digital devices, software, and applications. This includes basic tasks like typing, using a mouse, and navigating the internet, as well as more advanced skills like coding and using specialized software.

Information Literacy: The ability to find, evaluate, and use information from digital sources. This involves understanding how to search for information, assess its credibility, and use it appropriately.

Communication and Collaboration: The ability to communicate and collaborate with others using digital tools. This includes using email, social media, and other online platforms to share information and work together on projects.

Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving: The ability to think critically about digital content and solve problems using digital tools. This involves analyzing information, making decisions based on digital data, and troubleshooting technical issues.

Digital Citizenship: Understanding the ethical and responsible use of digital technologies. This includes knowledge of online safety, privacy, and the impact of one’s digital footprint.

Creativity and Innovation: The ability to create digital content, such as documents, presentations, videos, and websites. This involves using digital tools to express ideas and produce new content.

If we assume the skills and competencies mentioned are skillsets, we could create a similar table:

Skill set                      Skills                                                  Tools              For Tasks

Technical (basic)         Typing, using a mouse, nav. internet   PCs, tablets      Using digital tools

Technical (advanced)  Writing code, using spec. software     PCs, tablets      Creating apps

Information literacy    Searching, assessing, using approp.   Internet           Using digital sources

Comm. & Collab.        Communicating online, sharing data  Mobile devices Working together

C. Think. & Prob. Sol.  Analysing info, decision making       Various Apps    Solving problems

Creativity / Innovation Creating presentations, videos, sites  Digital tools     Expressing ideas

I didn’t include “Digital Citizenship” as a skill set, because I would consider this to be a mindset. Once that knowledge is acquired, it is essential that all stakeholders feel the need to establish and reinforce a mindset around ethical and responsible uses of digital technology.

Establishing skills literacy is the first step towards (digital) upskilling

Even if the term skills literacy is not defined, just like digital literacy and information literacy, these are important fundamentals we need to address. The topic of skills is more complex than most initially believe.  And skills literacy might just be one of the most essential skills to tackle this problem.  We can help society by volunteering our time to teach digital literacy in our community to improve digital skills.  And while we are at it, we might want to also help with skills literacy.